


Going home (you're not a runaway)

by bananas_are_love



Series: red/blue [1]
Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Canon Compliant, Erik is manipulative bastard, F/M, Home, Implied Beast/Mystique, M/M, Magneto has feelings, Mystique doesn't need a man, People get older and sometimes wiser, Wibbly Wobbly Time Between X3 and DoFP, Wierd Timeline, emotional talk, implied Charles/Raven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 19:06:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4316250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bananas_are_love/pseuds/bananas_are_love
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raven tries to run away, once.</p><p>Erik makes her stay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Going home (you're not a runaway)

Raven tries to run away, once.

It's only been three months, and she can't help but still think of the mansion in Westchester as home. Those dingy motel rooms or abandoned factories they sometimes stay in can never be home.

Neither can even the nicest hotel rooms in the capitals of the world they frequent from time to time, or the luxurious safehouses which once belonged to Shaw and are now theirs to use.

Home was never just a place, never just an old giant building or a cosy flat in Oxford. Home was also a warm, sturdy man with a big smile and brown hair and blue eyes who once before had been a tiny weak boy with an even bigger smile.

Raven tries to think of herself as strong and independent and capable, but one night she breaks. One night she packs a bag with some bread and a bottle of water and decides to take off.

Memories she suppressed for ten years come to the surface of her mind, she remembers running away from a frightened mother; running away from a loveless foster care; running away from the only man who's ever been good to her.

She shifts into a big, burly guy - it's safer to travel in a male form, that's not to discuss - and leaves the empty room she stayed in behind, makes it to the front door -

"You really want to leave?"

Erik emerges from the dark of the kitchen.

He looks so vulnerable, without his uniform and helmet, only dressed in an undershirt and pajama bottoms. In the first weeks he didn't take off the helmet even when he went to bed. Raven is still unsure whether he didn't trust Emma or feared Charles would track them. Azazel now payed the mansion a safety visit and saw the wheelchair that implied Charles had bigger things to worry about. Emma somehow convinced Erik that she was only with Shaw to reach her personal goals. Ever since, he takes it off at night.

In the pale moonlight his hair seems lighter, even slightly silver, and without the cape one can see the lean frame of his body more clearly. It's an almost ethereal, fragile figure. He may not look dangerous right now, but after three months of fighting together, Raven knows better.

Still, if she intends to follow through, she cannot let her fear show. A silent prayer that her voice won't shake, and she looks into his eyes and opens her mouth.

"I followed you last October because you encouraged me to do what I want. Why not let me go now when it's my decision just like I made one then?"

Erik clicks his tongue. He is smiling.

"You've done so well until now, why go back? Is it guilt? Remember how trapped you were, how he" - he stops to raise his eyebrows - "tried to tame you. Don't you enjoy your freedom?."

"I just-" Raven ripples back to her blue self, frustrated. She knows Erik is right.

But if only she had the chance to speak with Charles. She'd make him see, he'd understand after some time. They'd sort out their differences. He would forgive her, and maybe they could just go back to the way it was before.

( _Before what_ , a tiny voice in her head asks. _Before Erik appeared out of the blue or before you left Charles crying and paralysed in the sand?_ )

She is tired already of fighting. The cause the brotherhood fights for is a good one, but she does not feel welcome here. She cannot imagine she ever will. And Charles...

"You are valuable here, Mystique", Erik whispers and takes a step closer to her. "Charles cannot give you what you need. He does not see your potential. He does not see your beauty." Slowly he raises his right hand to stroke over Raven's forearm. "Let's not start lying to each other. Not you and me. He'll never love you the way you long him to. The way you deserve."

Tears start to dwell in Raven's eyes and she hates herself for it. Why is he right, how can he know that? She wants to scream _Get out of my head_ , because he is not even a telepath and he can see through her. How can they always read her mind, how do they manage to get inside her thoughts?

Erik's hand wanders from her forearm over her shoulder to her back and he pulls her close. Usually he does not show his kind side, but Raven knows it's there. She has seen it before. Tentatively she allows herself to wrap her arms around his strong back and buries her face on his chest.

"Erik, I don't feel well. I don't think I can manage. I miss home."

She can almost feel his smile as he cradles her head in his big hands and strokes over her hair.

"You'll get there. You'll start to get along with everyone. Just remember the cause. We're fighting for our mutant brothers and sisters so that they don't have to share our fate of a life in misery. And if it's any consolation to you", he murmurs into her hair, "you might miss home, but that does not necessarily mean that home misses you."

Raven sniffles into his shirt and tries to make herself believe his words. He could be right.

Maybe Charles is happy without his legs, but with Moira. Hank probably already forgot her over his research and his ever constant need to look and act normal. Sean and Alex have no reason at all to miss her, and surely Erik was right when he told her about Charles' idea of a boarding school for mutants in the mansion. Her old room will most likely soon be occupied by a scared teenager who thinks Charles is able to help him with his useless words and pacifism.

Erik breaks their embrace and straightens Raven's back. He wipes her tears from her cheeks (and Raven promises herself that she'll never cry again, at least not in front of him. She'll never cry again because of the home she lost. She'll never show weakness again) and says: "Go back to bed. We'll head off early tomorrow, and you don't want to disappoint me, do you?"

With a yawn Erik walks back to the stairs. When Raven does not follow immediately, he turns around again and stretches out his hand. His smile turns feral.

"You know, if you have a hard time falling asleep, there's always a place in my bed for you."

Raven is startled. Just months ago he outright refused her and send her away from his room.

"I thought I was too young?"

Now his smile is dangerous.

"You were. Past tense. I think you've grown a lot in these past few months."

Raven tries to think of it as a test. Tells herself that to be Mystique, that's exactly what she needs. Tells herself that she won't think of the fond look Charles sometimes had in his eyes when he looked at her. That she won't think of Hank's gentle hands as he touched her wrists.

Without any more hesitation she drops the bag she packed together with the decisions she made earlier and takes his hand.

/---\

They never speak of that night again. Not when she trades his bed for Azazel's after some time, nor when she proves her loyality once again as she breaks him out of prison in the mid-70s.

They don't even mention it when Magneto sends her back to the house in North Salem several times - just for the sake of their cause, obviously. Always their cause. In their years together she proved herself as unforgiving and ever functioning. Comparing the two of them, she is the one who does not look back. Magneto is secretly the sentimental one.

It's not until they sit in the Blackbird one night, on their run from the Sentinels. Charles is connected to a portable Cerebro in the back of the plane and Beast is in the cockpit. They sit around and try not to be too useless.

Mystique did not forgive him for leaving her cold and naked and without a disguise or any chance of help, and Magneto pretends not having forgiven her for ratting him out. They both know that he knows that she's not the one to blame here, though.

For the time being, they've barely talked. A few cold pleasantries here and there because Charles wishes it so, and apparently they must have gone back in time to 1962 because the thing they both long for the most, besides surviving, is to please Charles. It's like being huddled together in that enormous mansion once again. Only with less comfort.

Except now Mystique turns to Magneto and suddenly she can't stop herself. She has to ask.

"Erik, why didn't you let me go that January night?"

He lets out a heavy breath and closes his eyes. Seems as if he guessed correctly what night she refers to.

"Listen, Raven-"

A cold laugh echoes through the body of the plane.

"We both know I gave up that name years ago. Not even Charles calls me that anymore, then why do you? A late absolution?" The temptation to quote his own words from 50 years ago is too high: "Or is it guilt? Looking at it now, you could have spared both of us a lot of trouble if you had let me go back to Westchester then."

Magneto sighs, and Mystique wonders why he kept up that charade for forty years. Why make her feel special and not just useful, not like another one of his soldiers or minions? It doesn't matter. In the end he left her behind anyway. "

Mystique, then. My dear Mystique. I cannot tell you why I did or did not do things, or made decisions decades ago. All I know is that I'm glad you stayed with me. With us, with the brotherhood. I haven't got answers for you. Look at me. I am an old man who barely got his abilities back."

She looks at him, and he is right. He is an old man. Terribly old. An old fool, as he liked to call Charles before he died.

Suddenly she sees so clearly. She looks for traces of the young half-god she was almost but never quite in love with, or of the leader he used to be, and she finds none. He looks like he's been on earth for centuries. Tired.

There might be only one reason he still hopes, still fights. And that reason is not her, but sits in the back of this plane and tries to find a way out of this hell she unwillingly helped to create.

She decides she is old enough for the truth, now.

"So what? You're an old man. I am a old woman. You tend to forget that. I am over 80 years old."

She shifts into an old woman with white hair and wrinkles, though she'll probably never look like that. Like Hank once said, her ageing is slowed immensely. Instead she tries to change her face into something her blonde disguise might look like when 85 years old.

"Give me the fucking truth, Erik. I am not stupid."

He has a strange look in his old, tired eyes. Equals, that's what they finally are right now. They are old and look old and think the same old thoughts.

"I was afraid", he starts, chokes, and continues, "I was afraid you'd go back and tell Charles all the terrible things I've done."

"Erik, he had television and newspapers. He probably knew."

Magneto shakes his head and looks at the floor. "That's not the same. If he heard it from you, he'd know it was Erik, and not Magneto, who'd done that. Back then there was a difference between those two. And I feared", he chokes again, but this time he needs longer to continue, as if he doesn't know how to phrase it, "you'd go back and he would have missed you so much that he'd finally give you what you wanted. And I couldn't stand the thought of you having him."

Triumph grimly runs through Mystique's veins. It's a bitter feeling and she feels bile rise in her throat.

But she had decided years ago to pity Erik, not to be angry with him. She can't even really hate him what he had done to her, if she is to be honest. There is no use in being angry at a man who makes countless bad decisions over and over again.

Her voice sounds tight and sarcastic when she finds it again to answer. Erik has hidden his face behind his hands.

"Really, Erik? You were so insecure and scared that you saw me as a threat? Me? I didn't stand a chance with Charles long before he fished you out of the water. Let's not kid ourselves. I never was more than a sister to him. And I never should have been more to you, either."

She tries to give him a reassuring smile - it comes out as something sour. The newly formed wrinkles around her mouth surely make it worse, she suspects.

"I noticed you leaving several times each year and then smelling like his aftershave and old books and scotch whenever you came back. I wasn't surprised that you wanted to go to New York first after I broke you out of prison and when you then disappeared in thin air again for a week. You two share a quarter on this plane. You came to rescue me together. I am not stupid. I just didn't want to admit all that to myself in all these years. In the end, I didn't need him like I didn't need you to survive. In fact, you two seem to need each other."

Now the man beside her is weeping. A strange sight. Mystique hasn't seen him crying since that disaster on a Cuban beach and he'd been a young man with a face hidden under a helmet on that day.

The hard side of her, the one she cultivated in years and years by his side (but that has probably always been there, ever since she ran away with nothing but the clothes on her back from her father's raised fist) wants to tell him to stop. She can't bring herself to do so though.

She puts her hand over his and thinks, damn you, Charles, you'll always have that power over us, won't you, always trying to make us better and gentle and good. Then she realises that maybe it's not Charles, maybe it's the both of them, just her and Erik, and the fact that they have been friends for 60 years and they'll never change.

"We're good", she says hoarsely. After a second she shifts into her blue self. Morphs into a blonde Raven of 17 years, then into a young, indulgently and incorrigibly flirty smiling Charles.

A grim looking young Erik follows, and finally a copy of the Erik sitting beside her, old and wrinkly and with huge, teary eyes. It does not fail to make him smile.

She stands up and kisses him on his cheek.

"Don't forget we had our good times", she whispers and wipes his tears like he did to make her stay back then. And then Mystique rises and leaves, because otherwise she'd too start to cry. One of them needs to stay composed, she thinks.

Later that night, Beast announces that they could try to invade a laboratory to prevent the sentinels from further evolving. Charles thinks it's wiser to search for Kitty's group first, and of course Erik agrees with him.

Still, they don't try to stop Hank. Any plan is now better more useful than sitting in this plane and waiting for certain death.

Mystique decides to go with him. How strange to know they probably won't come back, she thinks as they change planes and take off with another, smaller Blackbird.

She looks back through the window at Charles and Erik, standing there side by side, not waving goodbye but silently wishing Hank and her a farewell.

When they are almost out of range, she feels one distant touch of Charles' mind intertwined with Erik's against her own and hopes that they understand.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to spellcheck for making me spell adverbs correctly.
> 
> Special thanks to Hannah for a quick beta and making me use full stops.


End file.
